Check out my Unicorn Cake!

A little special someone had a birthday recently, and a Unicorn Cake was requested.

Your wish is my command, little special someone!

I adapted the almond yellow cake recipe from Odense because I knew I wanted to incorporate almond paste into the cake batter. I doubled the recipe so that I could make this cake 4 tiers high. Also, instead of all egg yolks, I used 12 whole eggs. It turned out really moist and not boring at all.

Between the four layers, I alternated between chocolate ganache and lemon mousse.

For the chocolate ganache, I heated semi-sweet chocolate chips over a double boiler, added whipping cream and a splash of vanilla and that's it!

I used this recipe for the lemon mousse. This is actually a pretty good dessert on its own, and it was light and fresh inbetween cake layers. I replaced the lemon extract with lemon essential oil. Perfectly lemony!

I covered the tiers with a cream-cheese buttercream before covering the entire cake with homemade marshmallow fondant.

For the cream-cheese buttercream, it's basically regular buttercream (powdered sugar, vanilla, and butter), but I replaced half of the butter with cream cheese.

I made all of the flowers in the same way I did for the cupcakes, but I used different sizes and different colors to add variety. The horn was pretty easy and I formed it around a skewer. The ears are also made of fondant, and I kept them curled in place while they dried overnight. The "hair" of the unicorn is also marshmallow fondant.

This was my first time working with fondant, and I had no idea how to secure the decorations to the cake without having them fall off. Luckily, my resourceful mom did a little research and we decided to make 'fondant glue' to secure the flowers, hair, and ears to the cake.

Fondant glue is as simple as melting a bit of fondant and water in the microwave. Easy, and everything stayed secure! I did need to use a few random kitchen items to prop some of the roses up while the glue was drying.

For the eyelashes, I used food-grade charcoal powder (I brush my teeth with it sometimes.) mixed in with a bit of the remaining fondant glue, and I dabbed it on with the tip of a q-tip.

Like I said, this was my first time working with fondant, and while I love how the flowers and other decorations turned out, I'm on the fence about covering a whole cake with fondant - in the summer. I'm pretty sure that all of the 'sagging' of the fondant was due to warm August temperatures, and I decorated this cake the night before it was served. In the future, I might refrigerate it after decorating it, but this time I left it on the kitchen counter because I wasn't sure if the refrigerator would cause condensation after bringing it to room temperature.

Overall, I'm pretty happy with this cake. It made the birthday kid pretty happy AND it tasted really good too!

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Thanks for reading! If you enjoyed this post, please do check out my blog.

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All content and images by @jaymorebeet, taken on August 25-27, 2017 with a Canon 7D Mark II.